We’ve reported with mounting despair the calamitous decline of one of the world’s most beautiful arts centres and summer schools.
There was a glimmer of hope when the accomplished oboist and conductor Nicholas Daniel was announced last August as director of the summer school .
No longer.
Dartington has just appointed an overall director for the arts centre and the summer school combined, making Nick superfluous before he has been able to present his first season, his plans on the scrapheap.
The new boss is called Bill Gee. Nothing has been officially announced. The website is a shambles. Mr Gee is a bit of a mystery man.
Dartington is going down the drain.
The flamboyant organist was refused permission to enter the country at Birmingham Airport and sent back to Berlin. He has a premiere in Birmingham tomorrow and both his agent and the concert hall are desperately trying to get him back.
The deportation appears to have arisen from a misreading of immigration rules by border officials at Birmingham Airport. Or possibly because they didn’t like the way he dressed. Or whatever.
It is the third known case this year of an artist with a legitimate visa falling foul of these complex rules.
Read more about it here on the IAMA site. If you’re an agent or an artist, call your MP and ask them to put down a question to the Home Office. This signifies an increasing abuse of the rights of travelling artists.
UPDATE: All’s well that ends well? No, the disgrace deepens. Read here.
Carnegie Hall have just posted this on Youtube. More fun than they’ve had all year.
The singer announces it today on Youtube. The ceremony for John Paul II will take place in Poznan on April 27.
In November 2006, I wrote a newspaper column that attempted to assess what was then a new phenomenon of blogging about classical music.
It introduced newspaper readers to a range of sites and, for its reservations, aroused a degree of blogger indignation. Bob Shingleton, author of a blog titled On An Overgrown Path, had a blast back at me, and then another and another down the years.
Such is life.
Two and a half years later, I ended my involvement with print media and joined the blogosphere in my own fashion and with great satisfaction.
So it is with sorrow that I read this week that Bob, a retired EMI executive, has decided for various reasons ‘to stand back from blogging’.
His was a pioneering effort, a distinctive, detached voice in an often overheated and self-regarding medium. I shall miss his homilies.
Maybe this overdue tribute from an unintended antagonist will prompt Bob to reconsider.
Leonard Bogdanoff, born and raised in Philly, got his first job after the army as assistant principal viola in the New Orleans Symphony in 1955. But he barely made it to the end of the season before Eugene Ormandy’s people came calling his name. Leonard, who retired from the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2005, has died in Philadelphia, aged 83.
He joins the all-time list of longest serving orchestral players.
The early music pioneer is facing trial at the Old Bailey on charges of three rapes and eight indecent assaults, dating more than 20 years back.
A judge has agreed to defer the trial date to early 2015, when the diary is less busy.
His counsel said: ‘My client is a world famous musician and therefore earns his living on a job to job basis and has tours across the globe throughout the autumn – but the season slows down in the new year.’
Freshly posted on her page:
The violinist Mikhail Nodelman, who lives in Bochum, rse at the end of a Cologne performance of Britten’s War Requiem to unfurl the flag of independent Ukraine, with the slogan ‘no war’.
On his Facebook page Misha writes:
Well, hello, dear Crimeans! Glad to see you. I am writing to congratulate you on the last referendum in your life…
Courtney Lewis, recently named assistant conductor of the New York Phil, will take over the Houston concerts of Spanish maestro Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. Frühbeck, 80, fell ill while conducting the National Symphony Orch at the weekend and is in frail condition.
Two donatiions of $100,000 might just be enough to see the troubled Memphis Symphony Orchestra through the season, its manager tells AP. What happens beyond that is uncertain.
This is Tokyo, music city (photo courtesy of the touring Gewandhaus orchestra).
